Joe Mitchell, Jack Alexander, Richard O

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

Joe Mitchell, Jack Alexander, Richard O Joseph Mitchell and The New Yorker Nonfiction Writers by Norman Sims From Literary Journalism in the Twentieth Century, edited by Norman Sims (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2008). (Originally written before The New Yorker moved to its new offices. Also written prior to the publication of Joseph Mitchell’s Up in the Old Hotel, which used some of the text from my interview as Mitchell’s jacket copy.) At The New Yorker, when you get off the elevator you step into an off-white, narrow little prison of a waiting room. The receptionist phones the inner sanctum of the editorial offices, and your host meets you at the door. My host was Joseph Mitchell, who has been with The New Yorker since 1938. Although he was eighty-one-years-old and rumored to be a ghostly presence in the corridors of the magazine, he carried the grace of a much younger man. Mitchell’s last magazine article appeared in 1964. He has regularly gone to his office since then, feeding the speculation that this very private man has been writing some magnificent addition to the books he published between 1938 and 1965.1 Curiosity has been fed by Mitchell’s own last work, Joe Gould’s Secret, and by the appearance of a character similar to him in Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City. Not surprisingly, given his longevity at the institution, his office is the first one down the hallway. The furnishings—metal desk, cabinets, flooring that dates from the age of linoleum—are standard at The New Yorker. That narrow office was a place I never expected to reach. For years, Mitchell has turned down requests for interviews. Finding out what he has been doing the last twenty-five years was the least of my objectives. There are deeper mysteries in his writing. 1 Joseph Mitchell’s books include My Ears Are Bent (New York: Sheridan House, 1938), a collection of his newspaper work; McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1943); Old Mr. Flood (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1948); The Bottom of the Harbor (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1960); with Edmund Wilson, Apologies to the Iroquois With A Study of the Mohawks in High Steel (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1960), which contains Mitchell’s classic ethnographic study of the Indian ironworkers; and Joe Gould’s Secret (New York: Viking Press, 1965). Many of these works were reprinted in Up in the Old Hotel (1992). Mitchell and several of his colleagues at The New Yorker were responsible for keeping literary journalism alive during the middle years of the twentieth century before the New Journalism burst on the American scene. Mitchell’s nonfiction, and to some extent that of A. J. Liebling, adopted a creative approach and probed further into the borderlands of fiction and nonfiction than did many of the highly publicized experiments of the New Journalism. In the years just before World War II, The New Yorker magazine began nurturing literary journalists. Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925 as a magazine dedicated to humor, criticism, short fiction, and reportage. Its early success owed little to literary journalism, and a great deal to a talented staff. Katharine Angell edited the fiction department while E. B. White, later her husband, in his “Notes and Comment” essays developed a voice that would be called “The New Yorker style.” James Thurber contributed short pieces and humorous drawings that cemented both his reputation and the magazine’s. The genius who created The New Yorker was not necessarily a genius for organization. Ross fumbled repeatedly while looking for a managing editor. In 1933, he finally hired an editor who could make sense of his editorial system, and who would make a difference in the future of literary journalism. William Shawn arrived as a “Talk of the Town” writer and by 1939 was managing editor. After Ross’s death in 1951, Shawn succeeded him as editor and served for thirty-five years. Shawn’s rise to power came at an opportune time. The New Yorker editorial corps had weakened as three of its foundation stones departed. Thurber’s eyesight was failing and he steadily withdrew. Katharine and E. B. White moved to Maine in 1938, temporarily depriving the magazine of their guidance and contributions. The vacuum was gradually filled by new writers who made enduring contributions to literary journalism: John Jersey, John McNulty, Geoffrey Hellman, Joel Sayre, Alva Johnston, St. Clair McKelway, Philip Hamburger, John Lardner, Brendan Gill, Berton Roueché, John Bainbridge, and Lillian Ross. Referring to himself, Joe Mitchell, Jack Alexander, Richard O. Boyer, and Meyer Berger, A. J. Liebling once wrote, “I still think The New Yorker’s reporting before we got on it was pretty shoddy.”2 2 Raymond Sokolov, Wayward Reporter: The Life of A. J Liebling (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), pp. 104-5. Before they came to the magazine, most of the new writers had been newspaper feature reporters. Feature writing could be creative, especially under the editorship of someone like Stanley Walker, city editor of the New York Herald Tribune, but was severely limited in the time spent reporting and the scope of presentation. Moving to The New Yorker gave writers more time to work, more space (in print, if not in their cubbyhole offices), superb editing, greater autonomy, and—at least in the cases of Mitchell and Liebling—opportunities to pursue literary goals. The institutional conditions were ripe for literary journalism. Until the late 1950s, magazine writing had not fully exploited storytelling; one student of the era found little use of scenes, dramatization, or first-person narrative outside of The New Yorker.3 No American magazine had offered the consistent freedom and encouragement found at The New Yorker. The payoff came rapidly from writers such as Mitchell, Liebling, Hersey, Boyer, and Lillian Ross. Mitchell is a bright-eyed, energetic man who puzzles over things and takes pains to get them right. He dresses as he writes, in a stylish, comfortable, yet precise manner. He lacks a striking physical feature and never intrudes abruptly on a conversation. Talking with him is easy. His courtesy may be his most distinctive trait, along with an incredible memory. He grew up in the cotton and tobacco region near Fairmont, North Carolina, where his ancestors had lived since before the Revolutionary War. After four years at the University of North Carolina, he became a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune. He worked at the Herald Tribune and World- Telegram until 1938, except, as he said, “for a period in 1931 when I got sick of the whole business and went to sea.”4 Thereafter, he wrote profiles for The New Yorker of waterfront workers, people on the Bowery, Mohawk Indians who work on high structural steel, and characters from the Fulton Fish Market in the southeast corner of Manhattan near the Brooklyn Bridge. The literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman put Mitchell in the tradition of William Faulkner, Saul Bellow, and James Joyce. Hyman said Mitchell “is a reporter only in the sense that 3 Paul Bush, “The Use of Fiction Elements in Nonfiction: Proving the Existence of a New Genre,” Master’s degree thesis, Vermont College of Norwich University, 1989, Ch. 3. 4 Mitchell, My Ears Are Bent, p. 11. Defoe is a reporter.”5 Like Defoe in A Journal of the Plague Year, Mitchell wrote articles that are mixtures of fiction and nonfiction. “Mr. Flood,” a ninety-three-year-old retired house-wrecking contractor who lived in a waterfront hotel and pursued his remaining ambition of eating fish every day (and practically nothing else) and thereby living to be 115, was a composite character. “Combined in him are aspects of several old men who work or hang out in Fulton Fish Market, or who did in the past,” Mitchell explained. “I wanted these stories to be truthful rather than factual, but they are solidly based on facts.”6 Two of Mitchell’s books illustrate the advances in literary journalism at The New Yorker from the late 1930s to the 1960s. In The Bottom of the Harbor, Mitchell reprinted magazine pieces written between 1944 and 1959, including “Up in the Old Hotel,” his symbolic cultural portrait of the Fulton Fish Market. This piece illustrates Malcolm Cowley’s remark that “Mitchell…likes to start with an unimportant hero, but he collects all the facts about him, arranges them to give the desired effects, and usually ends by describing the customs of a whole community.”7 The Bottom of the Harbor also contained “The Rivermen” and “Mr. Hunter’s Grave,” examples of Mitchell at his best in searching out the psychological core of a person or the symbolic meaning of a topic. Mitchell’s last book, Joe Gould’s Secret, published in 1965 at the dawn of the New Journalism, represents self-expression in nonfiction that stands somewhere between the realist and modernist styles found among New Journalists. From the time Mitchell began writing about the Fulton Fish Market, he had a vision of a book that might report on the complexities of the characters he found there. He thought of writing about the fish market in the same way Melville wrote about whaling in Moby Dick. “I had an idea for a big book on the fish market,” Mitchell said.8 “I had those reefer trucks coming in from the East Coast, the West Coast, and the Gulf Coast and converging at South Street and Fulton Street early in 5 Stanley Edgar Hyman, “The Art of Joseph Mitchell,” in The Critic’s Credenlials (New York: Atheneum, 1978), p.
Recommended publications
  • City Mouse Or Country Mouse?—Joseph Mitchell’S Interpretation of the City
    City Mouse or Country Mouse?—Joseph Mitchell’s Interpretation of the City by Norman Sims Paper presented to the International Association for Literary Journalism Studies 2009 Convention at Northwestern University This paper briefly compares the sensibilities of two New Yorker writers: Joseph Mitchell, a native of North Carolina whose family owned land and was engaged in the tobacco business, and A. J. Liebling, who was a native of New York City. Liebling can be seen as the “city mouse.” In his classic works on the city, Liebling highlighted groups of people—con men, cigar store Indians, boxers and their entourages. Liebling saw people as created and determined by their surroundings. Liebling was at home in the city and he celebrated the traditional benefits of city life, such as the great food of Paris. Mitchell and Liebling were close friends, but there are differences in their work, or at least different tendencies. Mitchell’s works focused on individuals, rather than groups, and he rarely attributed a person’s character or actions to outside forces. While there’s a temptation to treat Mitchell as a “country mouse” whose perspectives were shaped in his rural background, this paper uses interview material to argue that Mitchell was as much a citizen of the city as Liebling. Unlike Liebling, Mitchell always felt he was an outsider in the city, and he tended to portray people whose marginality helped to define them, such as Joe Gould. Literature can be seen as the expression of identity. In fiction, we read for a window on the author’s mind, not for the facts of the world.
    [Show full text]
  • Directory of Seminars, Speakers, & Topics
    Columbia University | THE UNIVERSITY SEMINARS 2016 2015DIRECTORY OF SEMINARS, SPEAKERS, & TOPICS Contents Introduction . 4 History of the University Seminars . 6 Annual Report . 8 Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures Series . 10 Schoff and Warner Publication Awards . 13 Digital Archive Launch . 16 Tannenbaum-Warner Award and Lecture . .. 17 Book Launch and Reception: Plots . 21 2015–2016 Seminar Conferences: Women Mobilizing Memory: Collaboration and Co-Resistance . 22 Joseph Mitchell and the City: A Conversation with Thomas Kunkel And Gay Talese . 26 Alberto Burri: A Symposium at the Italian Academy of Columbia University . 27 “Doing” Shakespeare: The Plays in the Theatre . 28 The Politics of Memory: Victimization, Violence, and Contested Memories of the Past . 30 70TH Anniversary Conference on the History of the Seminar in the Renaissance . .. 40 Designing for Life And Death: Sustainable Disposition and Spaces Of Rememberance in the 21ST Century Metropolis . 41 Calling All Content Providers: Authors in the Brave New Worlds of Scholarly Communication . 46 104TH Meeting of the Society of Experimental Psychologists . 47 From Ebola to Zika: Difficulties of Present and Emerging Infectious Diseases . 50 The Quantitative Eighteenth Century: A Symposium . 51 Appetitive Behavior Festchrift: A Symposium Honoring Tony Sclafani and Karen Ackroff . 52 Indigenous Peoples’ Rights and Unreported Struggles: Conflict and Peace . 55 The Power to Move . 59 2015– 2016 Seminars . 60 Index of Seminars . 160 Directory of Seminars, Speakers, & Topics 2015–2016 3 ADVISORY COMMITTEE 2015–2016 Robert E. Remez, Chair Professor of Psychology, Barnard College George Andreopoulos Professor, Political Science and Criminal Justice CUNY Graduate School and University Center Susan Boynton Professor of Music, Columbia University Jennifer Crewe President and Director, Columbia University Press Kenneth T.
    [Show full text]
  • Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Here at the New Yorker by Brendan Gill Brendan Gill, Here in Westchester
    Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Here at The New Yorker by Brendan Gill Brendan Gill, Here in Westchester. BRONXVILLE B RENDAN GILL, the urbane drama critic for The New Yorker, is almost as hard to catch up with as the White Rabbit in “Alice in Wonderland—he's usually late for one or another important engagement. In addition to his reviewing responsibilities, Mr. Gill is the author of a biography of Charles A. Lindbergh and a book of short stories, “Ways of Loving.” He has also been a mainstay of historical‐preservation groups in the metropolitan area. A cosmopolitan suburbanite, he rises in his Bronxville here at 6 A.M., shuttles to his office in Manhattan, works through a busy day of appointments and writing, then goes off to see a play. Besides the 40 to 50 Broadway openings he attends during a season, he will see 20 to 30 Off Broadway shows and take trips to visit regional theater groups. He refuses to feel chastened by fairly widespread criticism that his memoir, “Here at The New Yorker,” is a “snobbish” book, laughing it off with the comment that “they always call me that, and I'm always indignant.” He won't be fashionably pessimistic about the future of New York City, and he won't be fashionably cynical about the virtues of suburban life. He recently completed a public lecture series at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on “Utopian Suburbs,” with talks on “Grooming the Wilderness,” about Llewellyn Park in New Jersey and Tuxedo Park in Westchester, “Parnassus by Rail,” about Lawrence Park in Bronxville and Garden City, L.I., and “Ghosts of Green Gardens,” about Forest Hills and Sunnyside in Queens.
    [Show full text]
  • By Joseph Mitchell Originally Published in the New Yorker, April 13, 1940
    The Old House at Home by Joseph Mitchell Originally published in The New Yorker, April 13, 1940 McSorley’s occupies the ground floor of a red-brick tenement at 15 Seventh Street, just off Cooper Square, where the Bowery ends. It was opened in 1854 and is the oldest saloon in New York City. In eighty-eight years it has had four owners—an Irish immigrant, his son, a retired policeman, and his daughter—and all of them have been opposed to change. It is equipped with electricity, but the bar is stubbornly illuminated with a pair of gas lamps, which flicker fitfully and throw shadows on the low, cobwebby ceiling each time someone opens the street door. There is no cash register. Coins are dropped in soup bowls—one for nickels, one for dimes, one for quarters, and one for halves—and bills are kept in a rosewood cashbox. It is a drowsy place; the bartenders never make a needless move, the customers nurse their mugs of ale, and the three clocks on the walls have not been in agreement for many years. The clientele is motley. It includes mechanics from the many garages in the neighborhood, salesmen from the restaurant-supply houses on Cooper Square, truck-drivers from Wanamaker’s, internes from Bellevue, students from Cooper Union, and clerks from the row of second-hand bookshops just north of Astor Place. The backbone of the clientele, however, is a rapidly thinning group of crusty old men, predominantly Irish, who have been drinking there since they were youths and now have a proprietary feeling about the place.
    [Show full text]
  • European Journal of American Studies, 12-4
    European journal of American studies 12-4 | 2017 Special Issue: Sound and Vision: Intermediality and American Music Electronic version URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/12383 DOI: 10.4000/ejas.12383 ISSN: 1991-9336 Publisher European Association for American Studies Electronic reference European journal of American studies, 12-4 | 2017, “Special Issue: Sound and Vision: Intermediality and American Music” [Online], Online since 22 December 2017, connection on 08 July 2021. URL: https:// journals.openedition.org/ejas/12383; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.12383 This text was automatically generated on 8 July 2021. European Journal of American studies 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction. Sound and Vision: Intermediality and American Music Frank Mehring and Eric Redling Looking Hip on the Square: Jazz, Cover Art, and the Rise of Creativity Johannes Voelz Jazz Between the Lines: Sound Notation, Dances, and Stereotypes in Hergé’s Early Tintin Comics Lukas Etter The Power of Conformity: Music, Sound, and Vision in Back to the Future Marc Priewe Sound, Vision, and Embodied Performativity in Beyoncé Knowles’ Visual Album Lemonade (2016) Johanna Hartmann “Talking ’Bout My Generation”: Visual History Interviews—A Practitioner’s Report Wolfgang Lorenz European journal of American studies, 12-4 | 2017 2 Introduction. Sound and Vision: Intermediality and American Music Frank Mehring and Eric Redling 1 The medium of music represents a pioneering force of crossing boundaries on cultural, ethnic, racial, and national levels. Critics such as Wilfried Raussert and Reinhold Wagnleitner argue that music more than any other medium travels easily across borders, language barriers, and creates new cultural contact zones (Raussert 1).
    [Show full text]
  • Newsletter the Society of Architectural Historians
    NEWSLETTER THE SOCIETY OF ARCHITECTURAL HISTORIANS AUGUST 1975 VOL. XIX NO. 4 PUBLISHED BY THE SOCIETY OF ARCHITECTURAL HISTORIANS 1700 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, Pa. 19103 • Spiro K. Kostof, President • Editor: Thomas M. Slade, 3901 Connecticut Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20008 • Assistant Editor: Elisabeth W. Potter, 22927 Edmonds Way, Edmonds, Washington, 98020 SAH NOTICES the Subcommittee on Science, Research, and Technology of the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology ... 1976 Annual Meeting, Philadelphia (May 19-24). Marian C. HYMAN MYERS AND GEORGE THOMAS organized an ex­ Donnelly, general chairman; Charles E. Peterson, FAIA, honor­ hibition of photographs, original drawings, hardware, and ary local chairman; and R. Damon Childs, local chairman. The plans of restoration work now in progress at the Pennsylvania call for papers appeared in the April Newsletter. Academy of Fine Arts designed by Furness and Hewitt. Shown at the AlA Gallery in Philadelphia last month, the exhibition 1977 Annual Meeting, Los Angeles (with College Art Associa­ material was drawn from private collections as well as those of tion) - February 2-7. Adolf K. Placzek, Columbia University, the Academy and the Philadelphia Museum of Art ... EVA D. is general chairman of the meeting. David S. Gebhard, Univer­ NOLL addressed the annual meeting of the Chester County sity of California, Santa Barbara, will act as local chairman. Historical Society last May on the subject of "Communica­ The call for papers appeared in the June Newsletter. tions Between the Colonies." Mrs. Noll, who is historian for Project 1776 sponsored by the Bicentennial Commission of 1975 Annual Tour- Annapolis and Southern Maryland (Octo­ Pennsylvania, spoke the preceding month in Pittsburgh at the ber 1-5).
    [Show full text]
  • Technical Proposal Cover Sheet
    REGION II UNIVERSITY TRANSPORTATION RESEARCH CENTER REGION II Marshak Hall, Room 910 Tel: 212-650-8050 New York, New Jersey, The City College of NY Fax: 212-650-8374 Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands New York, NY 10031 Website: www.utrc2.org TECHNICAL PROPOSAL COVER SHEET PROPOSAL TITLE: Innovative Travel Data Collection PURSUANT TO: Z-14-04 PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Name: Mitchell L. Moss Title: Director, Rudin Center; Henry Hart Rice Professor of Urban Policy and Planning Address: 295 Lafayette Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10012 Tel: 212-992-9865; Fax: 212-995-4166; Email: [email protected] CO-PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATORS: Name: Sarah Kaufman Title: Digital Manager Address: 295 Lafayette Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10012 Tel: 212-992-9865; Fax: 212-995-4166; Email: [email protected] Name: Anthony Townsend Title: Senior Research Fellow Address: 295 Lafayette Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10012 Tel: 212-992-9865; Fax: 212-995-4166; Email: [email protected] SPONSOR: NYMTC RESEARCH PROJECT MANAGER: Name: Marilyn Lopez Title: Program Administrator Address: 295 Lafayette Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10012 Tel: 212-992-9865; Fax: 212-995-4166; Email: [email protected] PROJECT DURATION: 8 months DATE SUBMITTED: September 24, 2014 CONSORTIUM MEMBERS City University of New York, Clarkson University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Hofstra University, Manhattan College, New Jersey Institute of Technology, New York Institute of Technology, New York University, Polytechnic Institute of NYU, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rowan University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Rutgers University*, State University of New York, Stevens Institute of Technology, Syracuse University, The College of New Jersey, University of Puerto Rico *Member under SAFETEA-LU Legislation Table of Contents Part I: Technical and Management Submittal .............................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • Journalist in Disguise St
    St. Norbert College Digital Commons @ St. Norbert College Pix Media Spring 2009 Journalist in disguise St. Norbert College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.snc.edu/pixmedia Recommended Citation St. Norbert College, "Journalist in disguise" (2009). Pix Media. 54. https://digitalcommons.snc.edu/pixmedia/54 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ St. Norbert College. It has been accepted for inclusion in Pix Media by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ St. Norbert College. For more information, please contact [email protected]. St. Norbert College Magazine - Journalist in disguise: Thomas Kunkel, president of St. Norbert College - St. Norbert College :: ACADEMIC PROGRAMS | ALUMNI | FUTURE STUDENTS | PARENTS | VISITORS (Students, faculty and staff) About SNC | A to Z Index | Directory QUICK LINKS: - Home - Magazine President's message Seven-figure gifts put athletics complex on the fast track Spring 2009 | Finding the Balance Student research goes Galapagos A short course in educationomics Economics lessons find their way to classrooms Journalist in around the world disguise: A look at Mastering the job search two books authored Finding $50 bills in the Web exclusives NFL draft by President Thomas Look here for web-only A short period of Kunkel content that expands economic growth By John Pennington, on topics presented in the An aardvark a day keeps Professor of English the doctor away current St. Norbert College Live! from Schuldes Magazine (PDF). Subscribe “I don’t care what is written about me so long as it isn’t true.” Dorothy Parker (1893- Student research E-newsletter 1967), American writer and goes Galapagos Television Show wit, founding member of the Reporting from one of the Press Releases Algonquin Round Table, and world’s best natural one of the original advisory laboratories.
    [Show full text]
  • The Many Secrets of Joe Gould
    Bridgewater Review Volume 25 | Issue 2 Article 11 Dec-2006 Cultural Commentary: The aM ny Secrets of Joe Gould Patricia J. Fanning Bridgewater State College, [email protected] Recommended Citation Fanning, Patricia J. (2006). Cultural Commentary: The aM ny Secrets of Joe Gould. Bridgewater Review, 25(2), 24-25. Available at: http://vc.bridgew.edu/br_rev/vol25/iss2/11 This item is available as part of Virtual Commons, the open-access institutional repository of Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, Massachusetts. Cultural Commentary The Many Secrets of Joe Gould Patricia J. Fanning Have you ever wondered who coined the term “oral history?” Buddhist, And in summer I’m According to an article in The Oral History Review, most a nudist.”). He began in 1917 people believe Columbia University Professor Allan Nevins, and by 1942 he estimated he who first used the term in 1948, got it from a Greenwich had close to a billion words, Village, New York character named Joe Gould, who in the all handwritten in school 1920s and 1930s claimed to be compiling “An Oral History composition books which he of Our Time” from overheard conversations, occasional inter- stored in friends’ studios and views and observations. Joe Gould. Therein lies this tale. on a farm in Connecticut. He predicted that he would Joseph Ferdinand Gould (1889–1957) was born in ultimately be known as “the Norwood, Massachusetts, the last of a family that could most brilliant historian of the trace its New England roots back to 1635. His grandfa- century.” The tales of dynas- ther and father were both Harvard-educated physicians.
    [Show full text]
  • Some of You May Know the Collection of Stories from the New Yorker By
    Sermon for the Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany February 17, 2019 Solemn Evensong By the Reverend Stephen Gerth Year 1: Genesis 29: 20–35; John 8:12–19; Luke 9:11b–17 Some of you may know the collection of stories from The New Yorker by the late Joseph Mitchell, Up in the Old Hotel.1 Mitchell was a writer for The New Yorker magazine from 1938 until he died in 1996. He suffered from writer’s block and published little after 1964.2 I read this collection when it came out in paperback while serving a congregation in Indiana—never imagining I would come to live and work in the heart of Manhattan. I think of Mitchell’s stories from time to time. From his writing I associated our glorious New York City steakhouses with an earlier tradition called, “throwing a beefsteak.” He wrote about the South Street Seaport, Fulton Fish Market and the working class restaurants there in his time. I also think of Mitchell when I see gypsy women offering to read palms. I remember his description of the way they worked. He believed gypsy 1 Joseph Mitchell, Up in the Old Hotel and Other Stories (New York: Vintage Books, 1993). 2 See Roger Angell, The New Yorker, June 10, 1996. 2 families were brought up to believe they had a right to steal.3 When I look at the readings in Genesis about the patriarchs, I see a family embedded with dysfunction from inbreeding and immorality of all kinds. In short, I am not a fan.
    [Show full text]
  • Stanley Edgar Hyman Papers [Finding Aid]. Library of Congress. [PDF
    Stanley Edgar Hyman Papers A Finding Aid to the Collection in the Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Library of Congress Washington, D.C. 1994 Revised 2013 March Contact information: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/mss.contact Additional search options available at: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/eadmss.ms997001 LC Online Catalog record: http://lccn.loc.gov/mm82058941 Prepared by Michael McElderry with the assistance of Scott McLemee Collection Summary Title: Stanley Edgar Hyman Papers Span Dates: 1932-1978 Bulk Dates: (bulk 1938-1970) ID No.: MSS58941 Creator: Hyman, Stanley Edgar, 1919-1970 Extent: 14,000 items ; 47 containers ; 18.6 linear feet Language: Collection material in English Location: Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Summary: Literary critic and educator. Correspondence, memoranda, journal, manuscripts of articles, book reviews, and books, research material, notes, reports, and other papers relating to Hyman's career as literary critic, book reviewer, and professor of language, literature, and the history of myth and ritual at Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont. Of special interest are files pertaining to his book review column published in the New Leader and letters written to Hyman by his wife, Shirley Jackson, and by his friend and mentor, Kenneth Burke. Selected Search Terms The following terms have been used to index the description of this collection in the Library's online catalog. They are grouped by name of person or organization, by subject or location, and by occupation and listed alphabetically therein. People Aaron, Daniel, 1912- Adler, Renata. Arvin, Newton, 1900-1963. Barth, John, 1930- Bernstein, Walter. Bodkin, Maud.
    [Show full text]
  • Trinity Tripod, 1984-05-20
    Commencement Issue The Vol. LXXXII, Issue 25 TRINITY COLLEGE, HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT May 20,1984 Honorary Degrees Awarded At Commencement Gill To Speak At Commencement Hartford, CT — Trinity College Bailyn's seven books include served as a curate in churches in will award six persons honorary two for which he received major New York before coming to Con- degrees at the College's 158th awards. The Ideologiacal Origins necticut as rector of St. Mark's Commencement Sunday, May 20, of the American Revolution won Church, Bridgeport, in 1966, 1984. the Pulitzer and Bancroft prizes where he served until 1981. He The names of the recipients in 1968, and The Ordeal of was elected a Bishop Suffragan in were announced to the faculty Thomas Hutchinson recieved a 1981, and as such has pastoral ov- May 8 by President James F. Eng- National Book Award in 1975. ersight of the western part of the lish, Jr. Bailyn was president of the diocese, from Litchfield to Green- Those to be honored are: Dr. American Historical Association wich. Bernard Bailyn, Adams Univer- in 1981. He holds honorary de- Bishop Coleridge is a Diplo- sity Professor, Harvard Univer- grees from eight colleges and uni- mate of the American Association sity; The Right Reverend Clarence versities. of Pastoral Counselors and super- N. Coleridge, Bishop Suffragan of Clarence N. Coleridge will re- vises pastoral counselors in train- the Episcopal Diocese of Con- ceive a Doctor of Divinity degree ing. He is a member of the necticut; S. Herbert Evison '12, a (D.D.). A native of Guyana, he is Academy of Certified Social conservationist; Brendan Gill, the a graduate of Howard University Workers.
    [Show full text]